Colonial Rhetoric and the Maternal Voice: Deconstruction and Disengagement in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out - Critical Essay

At the heart of Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out is a disengagement from the authority of the paternal word and an affirmation of the semiotic otherness of the maternal voice. The term semiotic here refers to those primarily aural, vocal, or physical qualities in language, such as rhythm, stress, repetition, echo, silence, and so on, that inform and can disrupt "literal" signification, and thus, by creating uncertainty, ambivalence, and paradox, destabilize meaning. Julia Kristeva distinguishes the semiotic, which she associates with the voice and body of the mother, from the symbolic, which is bound up with the paternal word and the law of the father. Since the semiotic arises from the preoedipal, preobjectal, and prelinguistic phase of human development, however, it is essentially genderless, relating to the feminine rather than the female, as well as to the voice (and ear) rather than the word. It is installed in the subject as "semiotic disposition" (Desire in Language 7), a latency that is repressed once the infant enters into the symbolic code, but can be activated by exposure to the pressures in language referred to above. The semiotic and the symbolic are therefore symbiotic and complementary, with the semiotic acting, so to speak, as the "other" of language, responsible for its inherent rhetoricity, for its affect.

The disengagement in The Voyage Out from the paternal word or symbolic code emerges from the persistent defeat of verbalization evident in the curiously frustrated conversations and abortive utterances of the characters, and particularly in the sterile rhetoric of the Dalloways, who epitomize the complacency of colonialism. Deconstruction of the paternal word is also manifest in tropes relating to sound. There is an insistent focus on the brutal, mechanistic noises of industry, the alienating effects of new acoustic technologies (such as the telephone and the phonograph), and the primordial din of the jungles of South America, which ultimately undermines the coherence of colonial, patriarchal language. Thus an affirmation of the maternal voice is aligned with a subtle and cumulative interrogation of the hollowness of the colonial enterprise itself.

The text's disenchantment with conventional rhetoric and social intercourse culminates, during the up-river sequence, in a stylized collapse of signification, a symbolic divestiture of the word, while there is a reciprocal investment in the purely vocal, as well as a gathering awareness throughout the text of the disruptive and uncanny power of sound. Simultaneously, the assumed impregnability of colonialism and the symbolic code is challenged in the indifferent otherness of the jungle. The way the novel develops can therefore be characterized as a response to the confining nature of its own language. There is a movement through and out of the discursive vapidity of colonial rhetoric and the paternal word and toward a reinstatement of the maternal voice. The semiotic stealthily emerges from the symbolic as the novel proceeds.

Dissension from the authority of the paternal word and realignment with the other of the maternal voice occur most disruptively and explicitly toward the end of the novel, with the journey up-river and with Rachel's death, but the ground is prepared earlier by the way in which imperial or colonial rhetoric deconstructs and destabilizes itself throughout the text. The reading process is progressively a listening process where we increasingly share Woolf's acute ear for the concealed weaknesses and tropological instability of apparently uncontroversial rhetorical formulations. The unraveling of the authority of colonial rhetoric centers around two particular tropes, the figure of inside/outside, and the metaphor of the state as machine. We are partly alerted to this rhetorical self-deconstruction through its accompaniment by what might be characterized as a soundtrack, the increasingly insistent inscriptions within the narrative of inhuman noise and nonverbal vocalizations, so that the apparent coherence of th e symbolic code is eroded by the alterity of sound and the increasingly explicit emergence of the semiotic.

There is also a sense of aberration and imminent catastrophe in the implied dissolution of boundaries between human and inhuman, in the concussions of engines and the creaking and throbbing of machinery, in the "melancholy moan" (Voyage Out 9) of the steamer and the alien sounds of ocean and jungle. The instantaneity of such sounds produces a special sort of unmediated registration of history. [1] Although Woolf is not necessarily in a position to construct an explicit critique, the "ear" of the author detects and records the traces of industrial capitalism's structural and historical crises as well as the dissonances and fissures inherent in the colonial enterprise itself. If history, or referentiality, is to be found anywhere, it is perhaps through the open, undefended orifice of the ear. The continuous assimilatory operations of the ear predispose it to the detection of discord in rhetoric and what Barthes calls the "pulsional incidents" (66-67) in language, those rhythms, percussions, and discords that s ubvert the assumed transparency and infallibility of the paternal word. Things can sound wrong even when they look right and, in this respect, The Voyage Out is a novel that listens to itself in an increasingly puzzled and dissatisfied way. In arguing this, I'll also suggest that the new acoustic technologies, like the telephone and the gramophone--enabling both language's ironic duplication and its alienating, subversive exteriorization--pose an additional threat to the integrity and immunity of the word.